


goldilocks

by eggblue



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-08-02
Updated: 2005-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggblue/pseuds/eggblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The politics of Robin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	goldilocks

He means well.

There are things in this life so ridiculous, he thinks, it’s a wonder it can seem any other way…

He often wishes for a deeper kind of unconsciousness -- beyond sleep, closer to the… other. Not quite… away from them. No, he wishes to be forever closer to them.

Bruce longs to be closer to Robin. He is afraid it might be the end of him.

He means well.

Dick is perfect. So perfect. All the love in the world is his. On the coldest, darkest nights, the nights where everything is believable, possible, Bruce allows himself to feel that night. It was the first time they’d met Ivy, the first time they’d felt her poison. And Bruce had shook, and Dick had gone still and watchful. Bruce had told him to run, told him. But he would not leave the car, he would not run into the woods, he would not leave Bruce’s side. He’d been scared, but he never left. Rain had fallen so hard on the roof, but Bruce’s breathing had been louder, thunderous. But he’d gone still when the breathing stopped, when Bruce had just looked through the cowl for endless seconds, when Bruce had been waiting for him to decide, for him to decide, because he didn’t know how else to move but closer, how else to move but desperate.

Then the shorts were ripped and Dick was crying and yelping but trying hard, trying harder, and doing what he’d been taught, to roll with it, to take it in stride, to conquer it and let it wash over him until he could breathe again. Bruce could see that, he had to. Or there would be no day afterward, no explanation, no partnership anymore. There is something Dick had seen long ago, before him before this, that he cannot touch, but that he somehow is, like nothing else Dick has ever found. Something like a trapeze. Something like the light under a circus tent, the yellow dimness of a fairy tale. Something like a mask, a smile, sawdust and sweat and the madness of a calliope.

Dick understood him too much. Dick forgave him too much. And Bruce knew that, knew the responsibility now of what it meant to have the boy’s heart, no matter what they wanted, no matter what they wished for. It was what it was.

His boy, his boy. Forever.

Dick is headed towards the edge again now. No one knows what Dick was like when he’d first found him. He didn’t offer the life to a tough little boy, ready to fight. He’d offered it as a desperate act to save the boy’s soul.

Dick was full of dark things, animal screams and cries that would last for days and fear and voices with no root or home. Only ideas that seemed plucked from the depths of Bruce himself, wants and needs a boy had no right to have, but he did.

Alfred had wondered if it was madness, a different madness than young Bruce’s, a louder, more alive kind, but still not right, still not sensible. There was something about a boy like Dick begging for oblivion that Bruce just couldn’t abide. And Bruce, being who he was, had one solution.

And maybe there’s something about Robin, the ridiculousness of it, the promise of oblivion or immortality, or the erasure of both this life you are living and any normal future; the hope and cynicism side by side; the way decisions don’t have to be made in the suit, they are made by the suit. Its structure exists whether there’s a boy inside or not. (Bruce just has to look at the case.) Because its wearers weren’t ever really boys, weren’t ever really innocent. But they’d deserved to be. That was enough for him.

Dick wanted the oblivion of loving someone. He wanted some desperate kind of romance, the way his parents looked at each other, held hands as they were falling. He wanted to be a part of that which he was never a part of. Dick had assumed, felt, that everyone loved Robin and not the boy inside it (and his Robin was an assumed identity, but it became his own). They were the same to Bruce, the same. Bruce knew what Robin was staving off, what Robin was saving. And if Dick had never really changed deep down from that mad little boy, at least most of the time he believed that he had. Bruce had to believe that too.

Or touching him like this would be evil. Fucking him just as hard as he wanted to would be giving into that child’s desire for oblivion, and not giving into the need for body language between partners.

That’s where it gets so messy Bruce isn’t sure he can rescue them anymore. And Dick looks so persuasive, so inviting, sometimes he has trouble remembering which is which. Which is Dick’s true face.

Bruce has the thankless job of boundaries.

He means well.

Tim is always too aware. He has a sense of alienation, aloneness, that no one human has the right to have. But he comes from cold privilege and cold parents and a cold generation. Even Bruce grew up with a sense of hope, a sense of denial. Not this. Not knowing that what you believe and what has made you are totally separate, at odds, false. Not where your survival and your destruction are eerily the same. Not knowing you were once naïve enough to know the difference, and yet growing ever older. And Tim is tired, weary of it.

Tim told Bruce once, long ago, about a recurring dream where Gotham’s citizens came together to form one giant body. The biggest, strongest bodies formed the feet; the sharpest, the eyes; the most flexible, the arms. Tim had tried to climb to the eyes, of course. He wants the oblivion of community. He wants to be a cog in a machine without conscience or awareness. He wants to disappear into perfection. He wants to quit trying to be what his family, his friends, want of him, what he can’t give.

They want that too, deep down. The Kryptonians. He knows it. They can speak forever about wanting to be human, but it will never be quite genuine. It’s easy to make promises that are impossible to keep. The easiest. Bruce knows. To them, Tim is human, alive, perfect. To everyone else, he is cold, alien, indecipherable. Like Dick, just like Dick, Tim wants to believe more than anything else. Tim wants to believe he can be human enough to fool them. He is. He really is. And Dick can know that too, Dick who he thinks can save them all.

And the aliens won’t feel the gulf, the futility, of how very human they are not. Bruce lets it go because it is important. Bruce understands the controls placed on every single being, the structure and the place everyone must believe in to function in chaos. That is his understanding. That is his genius. So he lets Tim go.

He means well.

But. There is an exception.

Jason doesn’t have boundaries. Jason has a hole. Jason has up and down.

Jason is… too much.

When Jason is unconscious, Bruce experiences a feeling akin to an artist. There are extremes to his aliveness and his silence, his stillness.

He was so happy in the morning. When that boy was in his arms. When he dreams of him, still. He had never liked mornings before.

Somewhere underneath that is a boy he can’t face. Somewhere underneath that is a tilted face, a pair of questioning eyes that are more almond-shaped, younger looking. But here, with Jason, there is a distraction, there are eyes so huge he can’t escape them, so blue he forgets there is any other shade. There are lips that have no definite form, that look like a tear so wide in skin so white that his palm aches to cover them, his body longs to push inside.

He’s learned this trick since their parting. He’s learned a kind of control in the mimicry of deathly silence. He waits and he breathes and he finds nothing, thinks of nothing, knows nothing any longer. Not what is here. Not what is gone.

In the silence he thinks he has discovered the one true line of the universe. He feels as if his blood has no oxygen, just something lighter, higher. He thinks it feels like light. He thinks he’s been contrary. Jason’s past was so dark, there are things he knows he’ll never find.

Despite images he glimpses, cheap wood-paneled walls and blond boys and too pale skin and too pale eyes pixelated, the shadow of his face on the faces of the street, the steam after the rain like his breath on the damp sweat of his skin, the rare silence of the night like the rarest lullabye, and it’s that same feeling he gives him, still gives him, so he goes to work and says thank you, he keeps working, and he waits, for the boy and the silence.

He meditates and he’s almost there. He meditates and he can feel that place.

He dreams of children the man might have. There are blond boys, deaf and mute. There are the lives he will save. There are structures he will build for him. There is the world he will create. The stray dog the young man brings home on his 50th birthday.

He gives himself to the memory, to the silence, and then there is nothing left to give, nothing left to waste or risk. Even if it is a lie.

Oblivion is a part of life. And what kind of life can he expect anyway? And it’s hard to fit Jason into society when Jason exists outside of it, like all true criminals, like all true geniuses.

Bruce Wayne is truly a part of Gotham, part of society. He is the cornerstone. Whether he really exists or not.

Jason was never fooled otherwise. He could have lived forever if Bruce had left him alone. But Bruce convinced him of the importance of things which held no importance for him. Love, family, honor, mother. Maybe if he were somebody else.

With them it was always “I told you so.” An argument proved by death. Jason had found so many ways to die, was familiar with death, had nothing to lose.

He knew about child addicts. He thought the Joker’s nitrous was amusing. He thought Harvey was stupidly serious. He reminded him of his father. He had a context for things where Robin had tried to create one. Robin’s context was not Jason’s. Jason was deadly practical. He knew of life beyond what society could give. He knew of life when all this came crumbling down. He lived his life in the context where it already had. Bruce wanted that kind of faith. But he had chosen the other side. His parents’ side. The side of the anti-criminal.

Except when they fucked. Bruce could pretend he was doing it for someone’s own good. He guessed it was Jason’s. Probably his own. But Jason knew, so he knew, they were going down the hole together.

And then Bruce grew to love the click of the camera, the smell of dirt, the taste of his slick body, the guttural screams, the surprise of blood, the feel of the fall, the pretense of finding the way back up, the shock of surviving after clarity, and the calm of having no loyalties.

He’d never understood criminals, truly, until he’d understood Jason. But… there were others. Bruce did have a family, a status, a collection of memories. He was never really free. He was just a fraud.

It is the difference between what you like and what you are. What turns you on and what you really are. What you enjoy and what you need. What amuses you and _what you are_.

He knows. Things (no, _lies_ ) like this result in slavery. Things like this result in murder. Disease. Corruption. Condemnation. The ruling class. The starving class. The winners. The lost.

Maybe Jason had wanted to believe as much as he had. For him to pretend otherwise… that was a fraud as well. There was no real way around it. Jason had no loyalties, not even to him. They could not live with themselves as long as they were together. And they could not live with that. They could live with the torture, it was the lying that got them.

In the end, Jason took the dive, and Bruce, no matter what anyone really believes, let him fall away. Just no one knew quite why. And Bruce, short of putting a gun to his head, knew of no other way they could be rid of each other. Such was love. Such was conscience. Such was loyalty.

Dick has Robin. Tim has the aliens. Jason has unquiet death. Bruce has memories. The nothingness. The everything.

He means well.


End file.
